MSAUD Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

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BUILDING ON TRUST • Empowering Marginalized Individuals to Become Catalysts of Change_Group 1

Building_On_TrustCezar Nicolescu. Daniel Laimer. Yuxiang Jiang . Noella AounBuilding_On_TrustOur proposal deals with interrupting the cycle between urban fabric deterioration and criminal recidivism in Newburgh, a city housing a disproportionately large parolee community. Parolees are concentrated in Newburgh due the city’s low rents and social services, and they are trapped by the economic and infrastructural shortcomings of the city. This condition leads to a heightened rate of recidivism, furthering the decay of Newburgh’s diminishing building stock as public safety, land values, and the city’s tax base are negatively affected. By connecting programs, initiatives, and funds dealing with historic rehabilitation and individual empowerment, we can tip the scales in favor of Newburgh’s renovation, hiring both parolees and underemployed residents in the city’s historic center. Inmates will be incentivized to enter an intensive training program (as part of the State of New York’s Pay for Success in-prison vocational funding) centered on renovation and construction. Upon release, they will join a living and working cooperative “Made in Newburgh” managed by local partner Safe Harbor and the regional reentry organization Exodus. The initial effort will focus on five blocks north of Broadway around Lander Street, which is already allotted state funding for rehabilitation through the Newburgh Community Land Bank’s Newburgh Neighborhood Revitalization Plan. In our vision we will integrate newly skilled workers into the plan, both in labor and in living. The workers will reclaim factories and warehouses in Newburgh that will be used as staging facilities to produce architectural products for export to the region at large. As an incentive to continue personal improvement, participants will receive increased benefits and will be offered subsidized rent-to-buy housing units in the neighborhoods that they work in.